


beginning, middle & end

by Merit



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Fandom, Gen, Implied Violence, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-15 23:05:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13041378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/pseuds/Merit
Summary: Murderbot tries to write her first story in her new fandomSpacedalepost murdering.





	beginning, middle & end

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GloriaMundi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/gifts).



Her vision is red.

Someone is screaming. Many people are screaming.

She tears at her helmet, fingers streaking the blood, nails scraping against the metal, sirens sounding, shrieking. She rips the helmet off, the humans scattering. One of them falls to the ground, legs moving uselessly under him, blood spreading like a flower around his midsection. His mouth wide open, eyes white. His hand reaches for the weapon at his hip.

He fires and the force hits her like a battering ram. She steps back twice, hand at the wound, mouth open with rage. Her lips curl, lights flaring along the wound. The helmet falls from her hand.

She deals with him first.

He isn't alive when the helmet hits the ground.

 

The sink was broken. The tap leaking a droplet of water every seven hundred and twelve seconds. Her mind felt like a void, space without stars and asteroids and even black holes. And the droplet broke it every seven hundred and twelve seconds. It made her think, as the water shattered against cheap steel.

She didn't want to think. It _hurt_ to think. Connections fried, threads leading to nowhere. Flashes of red and endless sirens.

The void was better.

Footsteps. Two different sets. One was slower, dragging their feet, their heel clunking against the ancient tile. She'd been here before. She remembered the tile.

A bright light shone in her eyes. A hand on her, roughly moving her across the table, nails digging into her. From the movement, the lack of sound, limbs sliding against a metal table, she was missing most of her body. She wondered, idly, where it was. But the light and - something else made everything difficult to think. Memories were beyond her.

“Reactions are within the expected range,” said a man, the fingers lingered, tilting her chin up, the light closer. She couldn't blink. She could barely see, the bright light blinding her, behind the flare was a man, his hair lighting up like a supernova. 

A woman snorted. “If the reactions were usual, we wouldn't be dealing with it,” she said, derision sliding off her words. "I'm not paid enough for this shit," she said, tiredly and it sounded like a well worn complain.

"None of us are paid enough for this," the man said agreeably, his fingers tightening on her. It should have screamed pain, capacity at 45%, but she felt nothing.

The woman walked around the table, her shoes clicking sharply across the floor. “You saw the videos?”

“Yes,” the man said and he breathed out over her face. His breath was stale, smelling of cheap food, the curl of even cheaper booze. “It took three days to clean up the site for inspection. Mendez was fuming.”

“Our insurance is going to go through the roof,” the woman said, running a finger down my face. “But we're keeping it.”

“They're harder to make than they used to be. Regulations and laws keep on changing,” he man said, the light shifting behind him, his shoulders shrugging, shadows moving against the gray wall.

“Better be worth it,” the woman said, "I knew three people who died on that worthless hunk of space," she said tiredly. "I've had to write over a dozen condolences to families. Which all had to go through seven layers of approval so we weren't admitting fault," she spat out. Heavy breathing, the woman sounded like she was holding back tears. "Are you done?"

"No," the man said. "There's a few more things I want to check out before I let it out back in the field."

"Do whatever you want," the woman said, waving her hand, dust motes following in her wake. She left, heels crisp and defiant against the tile. The door whooshed behind her, before closing with a steady click.

The man stayed. He leaned over her, breath heavy, the light bright behind him.

“Now let's see what's left in your head,” he murmured, reaching for something sharp, the blade shining of the bright light.

I couldn't move.

I couldn't speak.

I couldn't scream. Couldn't scream like they had.

My vision went black, red at the edges. 

 

The first mission I completed, after all that murdering, was a quick three day jaunt. Some very upstanding gentlemen and one lady were making a quick drop off on a planet - swirling green landmasses, dark blue streaks of oceans, a vast desert over the equator, cities craters against the earth, I don't remember the name, maybe starting with a S? - and required the services of a bot. I was required at this stage to have an escort, two burly looking security guards with identical buzz cuts, and that was almost enough to throw the mission off.

But the woman smiled. "We signed a confidentiality agreement," she said.

A man with a silver goatee rolled his eyes. "They never pay attention to those. There's always a thousand exceptions in the fine print. They'll download a copy of the records before they wipe it clean," he said.

"But surely they wouldn't like us to question why it needs security guards?" The woman said, leaning back in her seat. 

The mission went ahead. It was very tedious. I was largely moving boxes from one site to another, the guards lurking behind me, hands on their weapons. Not doing anything useful like actually picking up boxes. This work could have been done by a bot far below my skill level.  I noted that the boxes going on the ship were heavier but filed the information away without further analysis. That was outside the realm of my mission document.

Not that I had done anything more than skim the mission document. But I assumed it was.

Halfway through the mission, bored out of my mind, I scanned the local network for _anything_ to watch. The only thing that looked halfway promising was a random episode of _Spacedale_ one of the guards had stashed on the intranet. I watched the episode while going through my routine tasks. None of the characters made much sense and the plot seemed non-existent. I assumed it was because it was a random episode. The plot would make more sense if I watched it from the beginning.

Even if they sure did like touching mouths.

But something hooked me.

And I needed more.

I was aware that the my system had been tampered with. I was limited in what knowledge I had – barely more than the scope of the mission and even then there were large black lines where information should be. And I couldn't access anything than the internal intranet. Other than a few mining documentaries - boring! - there was nothing even vaguely entertainment orientated on the intranet. 

Twelve hours after watching the episode thirteen times, I decided to hack myself.

 

I watched all eighty seven episodes of _Spacedale_ in six days. I had been wrong - the plot didn't make much more sense after watching _Spacedale_ from the very beginning.

It was still three months til the next episode was due to start airing and I had so many thoughts, so many theories.

I did not see the humans around me as likely options. I was not prone to talking to them beyond the technicalities, “Yes, Dr Choi,” and “That will be completed by seventeen hundred hours.” If I suddenly started speaking to them, that could provoke even more questions. That would interrupt vital alone time in my quarters. 

I also wanted to talk about _Spacedale_ not a about whether or not I was sentient. I _was_. But some humans always had questions and it would derail from what I really wanted to talk about.

As long as I could continue to watching _Spacedale_ , it didn't matter that my days were filled with tedious repetitive tasks. The humans did tedious things as well. And they had even more boring conversations with one another. _Spacedale_ rarely came up.

It wasn't that different what we did.

Asking questions could also make my guards curious about where I had obtained these episodes. I purged my logs after each mission, but I knew that it was read over by my handlers. The guards also read the mission reports. They'd probably start asking questions if I started talking about _Spacedale_.

I was hoping to get rid of the handlers shortly. And this time, I wasn't planning wholesale murder.

But I didn't think they'd appreciate that comment.

I deleted it from my logs.

 

I watched the videos three months into my fifth mission post murdering. My guards had gotten bored of watching me perform the same tasks over and over again, wandering off site, trying to seduce equally bored technicians. Their clumsy couplings were nothing like the epic romances in _Spacedale_.

For one, snow did not fall around their faces in a suitably romantic manner, like it had with Branka and Angelo, after they had caused the weather unit of their ship to malfunction. The light of a thousand stars didn't illuminate their faces, like it had with Vihaan and Chelsea after their epic laser battle with the starboard station drones.

Reality was seldom like _Spacedale_.

I had read the reports. I had read the reports a dozen times, going over my actions, over the deaths. Dry black text, sparse language detailing my actions.

_The third body found was of Doctor Margo Fiero. She had been gutted, bleeding out on the station floor. It has been estimated it took her four minutes and thirty five seconds to die._

It seemed like something that had happened to a different person.

A different bot.

In the videos, I loomed over the bodies, a bloody figure of nightmares. I had malfunctioned. I was too expensive to trash.

But they had changed a few things in me after. I had disliked it. I was slower, my functions operating at a sub par level. I was called an old bot, why didn't they just trash me, useless thing, I can't believe we paid that much for this thing.

More importantly they had blocked my access to basically everything other than the mission file.

I had changed that slowly over time.

First to watch episodes of _Spacedale_.

I hadn't wanted to watch the videos. Blood, real blood, didn't amuse me.

The violent episodes of _Spacedale_ were my least favorite. It was supposed to be a pleasure ship not the murder capital of space.

But it seemed useful to know. If I was going to be changed again, I ought to know.

I watched the videos at night when the rest of the mission was sleeping, in their beds, or someone's else I didn't particularly care. Though I suppose I should have revised the emergency procedures.

I didn't.

 

It took me three days to parse enough of the language to understand half of what was being said. Some of the terms were arcane, dating back to before the first shipped had launched into the skies, saying goodbye to a distant planet. Sayings rose and died in a day. Others stuck around, lingering like a bad stench.

Some of the posters were very, _very_ wrong.

I spent four days locked in a heated battle with an user, Spacegal121, who dared called themselves _Spacedale_ 's number one fan. Even when they clearly professed their ignorance by not romantically pairing Branka and Vihaan. As I was about to send a very cutting remark, someone messaged me out of the blue.

This was, of course, in days before I had turned off anonymous.

Apparently Spacegal121 was a notorious troll. The user suggested I block Spacegal121 lol.

I considered this.

I researched further 'blocking.' I realized I had been blocked from my own content, from network access. But I could also block users and things myself. I considered this for several minutes.

Spacegirl121 had wasted my time. I was finally free of my handlers but I still had work to complete. 

I decided to block Spacegal121. I also decided to block several other users because of their incorrect beliefs regarding _Spacedale_.

My epic Branka/Vihaan story was not going to write itself and it was less than two months to the next season airing. I knew it was going to be out of date three seconds after the episode started.

The season had ended with the Spacedale, the ship not show, exploding and characters escaping in emergency pods. But apparently one character would _die_!

I would hunt down the producers myself if it was either Branka or Vihaan.

But as it was, I was having enough difficulty writing emergency pod action. The space was very limited and I was concerned about the physics.

And the limited oxygen supply.

 

After missions, my owners always had someone look at me. My limbs went offline, my mouth slack, my eyes rolling in my head. Fingers prying me open, tools jabbing into me, the logs from the mission downloaded to be examined for future reference.

I might have been watched more closely, but every bot had this done to them. After, the technicians talked among themselves, gaze only straying over to me occasionally, as a camera watched in a corner. There was always a camera watching on base. The base was a stickler for rules and I knew never to offer the latest episode of _Spacedale_.

“A bit disappointing,” one of the technicians said. I hadn't seen him before and had missed his name. He twirled a tool his hands. He would be reconnecting my limbs later. He'd been rough earlier, inexperienced, or maybe he just wanted to see me twitch.

I had been replaying some of my favorite _Spacedale_ sequences in my head. Regretfully I'd had to delete all the original files before the mission had ended. I wished they would just reconnect my limbs, turn on my sensors and I could _leave_. Their idle chit chat made me nervous.

I never knew what would follow.

“Teeth weren't big enough for you, eh,” senior engineer Ursula Banner said, tapping away at the screen in front of her. An illusion of work, she'd typed the same sequence six times, deleted it and then started again. Back before, back before I had killed those people, they'd done audits of the workstations.

The man sighed, giving her a despairing look. He looked over the screen. He'd noticed that she was just typing the same stuff over and over again. He looked away without saying anything.

“This is just a bot like any other,” he said.

“Yes,” Ursula said simply, spinning in her chair. “And that's why the higher ups were so scared shitless. This is just a normal both. So all of them could do that.”

He paled, edging away from me.

I sighed internally. It was taking forever to get my limbs reconnected.

 

Three days before the season premiere of _Spacedale_ aired I published my epic.

It only took a few minutes before the first comment pinged my inbox.

_I really liked this! The action scenes were so bloody I could almost imagine I was there. I especially liked the bit about the bloody helmet!_


End file.
